To promote high efficiency processing of graphics primitives, large primitives may be subdivided into a plurality of smaller primitives prior to construction of a high-quality bounding volume hierarchy (BVH). High-quality BVHs are essential for performing efficient ray tracing on a graphics processing unit (GPU). One conventional technique splits bounding boxes of triangle primitives along a longest axis of the bounding box if the surface area of the bounding box exceeds a pre-defined threshold as described by Ernst and Greiner [2007]. A similar scheme to split triangle primitive edges based on the volume of the axis-aligned bounding boxes of the triangle primitives is proposed by Dammertz and Keller [2008]. However, neither of these techniques has been proven to reliably improve ray tracing performance in practice. Instead, for some scenes, the ray tracing performance decreases. Another problem is that the amount of memory needed to store the data generated when the bounding boxes are split is difficult to predict. Thus, there is a need for addressing the issue of splitting bounding boxes of primitives to improve ray tracing performance and/or other issues associated with the prior art.